by Deb Caletti
“Probably not.”
“Life’s messed up at the moment.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“If you’re fine just now, I’m going to go talk to Dino.”
I nodded.
Every circus needs a ringmaster, and ours gave my shoulders a squeeze and disappeared out of the room.
Dino found a way to solve his problem with Ian, which was that he would allow Ian to have a private life, only he would give him no time in which to have it. His requirements for continuing to help Ian were that Ian must commit to daily lessons with him and to evening practice at home. Dino and Ian’s mother had had a meeting. They’d jump off a bridge if I told them to, Dino had said. Ian’s mother had a talk with Ian. He had no choice, Ian told me. Curtis was the single scholarship-only college in the country. Affording even a small part of a partial scholarship was out of the question, paying living expenses was out of the question, and a degree from Curtis would ensure his best shot at a job and performance contracts.
What about trees? I had asked.
I can’t do trees, Ian had said. I just … I can’t explain. I’ve got to make his happen.
I don’t get it. It’s your life.
It’s an opportunity I can’t pass up.
I had the sick feeling that Dino had been right about one thing. He understood Ian in this way that I didn’t. There were things I couldn’t see or know. I didn’t realize then that everyone had their secrets.
I didn’t see much of Ian, which was obviously part of the plan. He studied in the morning at home to finish his requirements for school, came over in the afternoons for lessons, and had to leave quickly in order to get his practice time in. We only had a moment for a quick hello and good-bye, and the times I saw him he was tired and strung out. The only real piece I had of Ian was his music, traveling up the stairs during his practices, or coming through the door as I sat my back down against it and listened to what was happening inside that office. I savored what I had. I’d close my eyes and let the music lift me up and hold me. Yes, yes, good. Very good, Dino would say. I would imagine lemon trees and cobbled streets made warm by the sun, orange-colored buildings and baskets of figs. I would imagine us sharing a cup of coffee at a small iron table, sneaking into an old church to gulp cool air. A life together of simple, good things. I imagined bicycles in canals, Sabbotino Grappa at sunset.
After practices, Dino himself would disappear into his office and his own place of creation. If he was paranoid then, I didn’t know it. I never saw him. But my mother was dealing with things I had no idea about. I heard her on the phone a lot with Alice, and Mom would hang up quickly when I came in. I would hear her crying, and when I would investigate, she’d wipe her face and lie and say she wasn’t.
It was as if Dino and Ian had both descended into some other dark world, where all thoughts and all moments were music, music, music. Frenzied playing, lost men. Italian phrases—sforzando, con calore, adagietto, a land with its own language, even. The repetition of passages; frustration at not getting it right, try again. Try again until it is perfect, the perfect translation of all of love and sorrow, of struggle and triumph. It wasn’t notes they were playing, not really. It was not songs. They were playing all the passion and drama of life, nothing less. Expressing the questions, searching for the answers. At least they were able to do this through their music. I had questions, questions that seemed to multiply like bad news multiplies. Even the vastness of the universe, looking through my telescope, did not put those questions into perspective.
Siang came over one afternoon, when they were at their height of joint possession, Dino with his composing, Ian with his practicing. I was worried about her being there, tried to get her to go home, as I was afraid of what she might see. The day before I’d experienced the first sign in a while that Dino was still in the throws of his illness. I had come home to the stereo blasting, and when I turned it down Dino stormed from his office. What are you doing? he had said. I need that on. If that prick is listening somehow, he won’t hear a thing.
Siang had practically begged to come in. When we finally went inside, I wished right away I had held my ground. The kitchen was a mess—filled with clutter and disgusting cigarette butts. Their snakey stink was everywhere—in coffee cups, on the newspaper, in the sink. I cleaned up as Siang either didn’t notice or pretended not to. She had slung her backpack to our kitchen floor, unzipped it and rifled through.
“I want to show you something,” she had said. “Something I found out.”
“I don’t want to hear obscure facts of Dino’s life, okay? I don’t give a shit how old he was when he first rolled over.” I clanked a coffee cup against the side of the garbage can to dump the ashes, saved it from getting cancer.
“It’s not that,” she said into her open backpack.
“I don’t give a shit when he first said goo goo.”
“Just wait,” she said.
“He got his first chest hair at sixteen. Whoopee.”
Finally, Siang pulled a folded sheet of paper from her backpack. She carefully flattened it out, smoothed out the creases with her palm. “That painting. In his office. The one over his desk.”
I looked at the image. Sure enough, it was the painting of the flowers that Dino had there, the one Siang had straightened so carefully that day we had seen the blank pages.
“So?” I said.
“And this,” Siang said. She fished around in her backpack some more, pulled out Strings Magazine. She folded back the cover to an interview that Dino had given, and began to read.
“‘Question,’” Siang squeaked. “‘Who or what was your greatest influence?’ Answer: Well, naturally it was my mother. She was a rose. A wild rose. Beautiful because she was wild. Wild because the world gave her too much beauty. More than could be tamed.’ ‘Question: Is that a good description of you too? Beauty that cannot be tamed?’ ‘Answer: I wish it weren’t so. Then I could be at peace. Wearing my slippers and smoking a pipe.’”9
“What’s your point?” I asked.
“That’s the name of the painting. It’s called Wild Roses. It was done by van Gogh.”
“I think it should be called Ugly Flowers on Bland Canvas,” I said.
“I think it is especially beautiful.”
“Jeez, Siang. Maybe if you cross your eyes. Maybe if you’re color-blind. Or asleep.”
“It’s beautiful because it was one of his last paintings.
It was done when he was at Daubigny’s garden, experiencing his most intensely creative period. Right before his suicide.” The word hung there between us. Suicide. This word that is usually so far away from you as to have a sense of unreality. Right then, spoken aloud, it became as real as those ashes, as Dino’s eyes searching for villains, as my mother’s hushed calls to the doctor.
Siang was trying to tell me something, I knew. Her urgency, these clippings, were both a warning and an attempt to get me to understand something important. I’m sorry, but it wasn’t anything I cared to hear.
I gathered the clippings, put them back inside her pack, and zipped it closed. “It’s just a stupid painting, Siang,” I said.
You should have seen Ian’s eyes. Dark, smeary circles underneath, like someone had set a pair of coffee cups thoughtlessly there without a coaster. I kissed him goodbye one day, and then put my hands in his coat pockets. The underside of his neck was a bright, angry red from the violin.
“Cassie, I’ve got to go.” His tone was sharp. He’d never been short-tempered with me before. He was such a gentle person. I took my hands from his pockets, went inside. He called that night to apologize. I’m just so tired. This schedule is killing me.
He wasn’t the only one looking like hell. Dino’s concert was a few weeks away, and rehearsals were scheduled to begin. According to Mom, he had two of the three pieces finished, but was still writing the last one. Worse yet, he’d heard that William Tiero had taken on a new client, the acclaimed female violinist Anna Zartarski. She’d b
een asked to do the Great Performers Series at Lincoln Center in New York, which would then be shown as a PBS television special. Dino walked around in a perpetual state of anguish. His body was there, his eyes would even look at you, but his replies were random. He went through those horrible cigarettes like Zebe can go through a bag of Cheetos. His paranoia was increasing, though it came in waves. I saw him checking the caller ID repeatedly, and he asked daily about the numbers that appeared there. That’s Zebe’s number, I’d say for the thousandth time. That’s Sophie’s. He pelted my mother with questions about when she went out. If she’d seen anyone hanging around. If she’d heard anything from various people who knew William Tiero. Even if she were meeting with him herself. He looked in the paper twice a day, the same paper, for mention of Anna Zartarski, I guess. We were living with an astrological phenomenon—something like the comets the size of a house that every few seconds break up in the atmosphere as they approach Earth. Daily explosions, not quite disasters.
Irritability was going around like the flu. It seemed like it was just as contagious. My mother had to practice now too, as performances were coming up for the theater she was contracted with. She’d set up in the dining room, but suddenly our house was too small. She couldn’t practice when Dino was working, so she waited until the evenings, after he’d holed himself in their bedroom. The low tones of the cello were soothing after the manic, high-strung violins I’d been hearing for weeks. The cello sounds like a kind grandfather, while the violin is the ultimate PMS instrument.
One afternoon, I listened to Mom play for a while as I did my homework in my room. World History had given me the sudden craving for food that boredom can bring, and I had just gotten up to head down to the kitchen when I heard the thud thud thud of feet on the stairs, then in the hallway, heading for the dining room. The cello stopped.
“Am I disturbing you?” Mom asked.
“Your playing is grating on my nerves,” Dino barked. “I am trying to rest.”
“You know I have to practice too.” I could tell she was on the edge of being really pissed off. Her voice gets this sound of having walls around it.
“That is abundantly obvious,” he said.
What came next wasn’t exactly silence, because although it was quiet, a thousand things were being said. I hated that part about an unhappy household—that feeling of being perched and listening, the way an animal must feel at night in the dark, assessing danger. Dino must have decided to leave then, because I heard the front door open and close. His car started up in the driveway. My heart felt sick for my mother at the blow he’d dealt. I had Brief Fantasy Number Twelve Thousand and Four, Dino wrapped in the heavy, partly singed dining room curtains. Rolled up like those foil-wrapped candies, twist-tied at the end. After a few moments I went downstairs and into the dining room where my mother stood, holding up Grandfather Cello as if she’d just helped him to the bathroom. She sat back down again in front of her stand, looked at me, and then groaned out a few notes with her bow.
“Damn it,” she said.
“That was real nice of him.”
“I shouldn’t say this, but you know, sometimes he’s really an asshole.”
“News flash,” I said.
“I keep trying to tell myself he’s a sick man.”
“Yeah, but maybe if he wasn’t sick, he’d just be a healthy asshole.”
“I’m tired, you know that? I’m going to become a nun.”
“Then you’d be married to Christ and he probably wouldn’t pick up his socks, either,” I said.
“Really,” she sighed. “A few more weeks. Four,” she said. “He promised he’d go back on the medicine right after the performance.”
“If he doesn’t crack up before then.”
“Please, Cassie. You know? Let’s not do this just now. I’ve got more than I can take as it is.”
As I said, irritability was everywhere.
I heard violins in my sleep. I’d actually be dreaming and they’d be playing in the background, or they’d be the focus of the dream, my math class playing them, say, or me performing in front of an audience but forgetting my music. Mostly I dreamed of violins destroyed. People bashing them, violins falling from the sky, or floating on the water. Thrown into the water and sinking. We were a month away from that horrible concert. Just two weeks from Ian’s audition.
I began to shut out the sound of those violins whenever they were practicing. Even Ian. What was my only connection to him became a hated sound. The violin was the object of his possession, in the way a bottle of wine possesses an alcoholic before it destroys him. I put on earphones, or got into the car and drove when I would hear the instrument. I would stand out with my telescope under a sky too clouded to see a thing. I would slam the door before I left so that my mother would know how angry I was at where our lives had gone. I felt sorry for her and her obvious unhappiness, but then my pity would just flee the scene and I’d get pissed. I blamed her for bringing us there, for being taken in by genius and fame and some twisted form of love, blinded, so that her own well-being and my well-being had been drowned out by the sound of that music. So, slam—that’s how I felt about it all. Let the windows rattle with my fury.
The next time Ian came for his lesson he was wearing his dark coat and his scarf. When he came inside I saw that the scarf had slipped down so that one side was falling down the back of his coat, prevented from hitting the ground only by one small end piece that was doing its desperate best to hang on. It was just luck that kept it from dropping away from him on the way over, lost in a juniper bush somewhere, carted off by some neighborhood dog, dropped on the muddy street and run over by the tires of a telephone company truck. Okay, if I’m sounding a bit dramatic here, it’s because I was feeling a bit dramatic. It was symbolic to me, that scarf I gave him slipping and falling, the carelessness he showed in letting it happen. The way it could be lost without him noticing.
He was already in practice mode, so I doubted he even realized that when I pushed past him that day and went outside it was with the same kind of fury and helplessness I slammed doors with. No one was paying attention. No one was seeing. Our lives were careening downhill, gaining the momentum that only self-destruction has, and no one was even trying to hold on.
My scarf anger turned to surprise when I saw Chuck and Bunny in the Datsun parked at the curb. For some reason I pictured Ian on his bike, the scarf dropping off behind him as he rode on, oblivious to the near miss of it getting caught in the spokes. I hadn’t pictured it slipping off in Chuck’s backseat, lying there for a nice ride around town amid a couple of old coffee cups, a pair of muddy tennis shoes, a two-disc compilation of Donna Summer hits and some library book titled Planning the English Garden.
I poked my head in the open window of the car. “Don’t you guys ever work?” I asked.
“Hey, Lassie,” Chuck said.
“There’s a strike at the Dairigold plant,” Bunny said. He was unwrapping the foil from a cheeseburger. “That’s where we work. Anyway, I got some money tucked aside.”
“We both got our massage therapist licenses, but there’re not many openings here,” Chuck said. “Jesus, Bun, eat over your napkin. You see why I don’t let him eat and drive? It’s a hazard.”
“These aren’t my clean jeans,” Bunny said with his mouth full. He plucked the spilled bit of pickle and lettuce from his lap and popped that in too.
“Massage therapists? You’re kidding.” That could scare the crap out of you, lying there on some table with only terry cloth for protection and seeing one of them walk in. You’d scream with fear that you were about to be taken hostage and made to wear leather pants and a shirt with some biker chick on it that said BUILT TO RIDE.
“The healing power of touch can work miracles,” said Bunny through the cheeseburger. At least I think that’s what he said. It could have been “The strength in my hands could break you in half.” Or maybe “I should never be allowed to touch anyone because the back of my Harley-Davids
on T-shirt says IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THE BITCH FELL OFF.
“Wow,” I said, mostly to be on the safe side.
“It is a great release of negative energy,” Chuck said. “Flows through your fingers and disperses into the universe, floating away with your cares.” He was sounding like a bubble bath commercial.
“Speaking of negative energy,” Bunny said. He slurped his drink. He held it between his knees. Hey, Mom had that kind of cup holder in her car, too.
“Have you noticed that Mozart’s been a little uptight?” Chuck said.
“Just a little?” I didn’t correct him on the fact that Mozart never played the violin—we both knew who he was referring to.
“Frankly I’m getting a little concerned about him,” Bunny said.
“His chakras are all blown to shit,” Chuck said.
My heart rose a little. I didn’t know my chakra from a hole in the ground, as the saying sort of goes. It sounded like something you had in a Greek restaurant with a side of yogurt sauce, but who cared? Someone else was on my side in this, this feeling that things were getting out of control. I felt a surge of energy; the relief of someone helping you pick up the other end of something heavy.
“He looks horrible,” I said. “He looks so tired.”
“He left the dog out all night.”
“He needs a day off, only his mother doesn’t see it,” Bunny said. “I love her to death, but she can’t see the forest for the sea where that violin’s concerned.”
“Trees,” Chuck said. “You moron. Forest for the trees.”
“Trees? That don’t make any sense. Of course you see trees in a forest.”
“That’s not what it means,” Chuck said.
“I don’t care, all right? You know what I’m saying.”
“I agree,” I said. “He needs a rest.”
“Sea,” Chuck chuckled. “Heh, heh, heh. Forest for the sea.”
“Shut the hell up, Chuck. I heard you sing the ‘Twelve Days of Christmas.’”
“So what?”
“Three French men, two turtle doves.”
